Double-Digit Tax Hike Possible in Troubled Peekskill Budget
Peekskill residents could be facing a tax increase as high as 11% next year if a retooled 2015 budget is approved by the Common Council next month.
A tentative $53.44 million budget submitted by Peekskill City Manager Anthony Ruggiero last month called for a 2.2% tax hike, along with increases in water and sewer rates and adding a garbage collection fee for all residents, but the council balked at the Sanitation Fund after receiving a barrage of complaints.
The council also put the brakes on any new hires, opposed the allocation of $350,000 to begin citywide property revaluation and disagreed with Ruggiero’s recommendation for the city to withdraw from the New York State Employee Pension Stabilization Program.
Even with all those changes, the city remains in somewhat financial dire straits, according to Mayor Frank Catalina and Comptroller Ann Maestri, and is looking for some guidance from its auditors on how to deal with a possible 7 to 11% property tax hike.
“We’ve had many years of using our fund balance but it hasn’t been realistic. Now the buck stops here,” Maestri told the council during a budget work session last week. “At this point we have a mess on our hands and we have to clean up our mess.”
Catalina, who was highly critical of the financial management of Mayor Mary Foster’s administration last year when he successfully ran for mayor, blamed Ruggiero for putting the council in a difficult predicament, saying, “A guy with experience would not have produced that budget.”
“In effect he’s saying, ‘I gave you a budget and now it’s your job.’ I take offense to that. He’s the one making $160,000,” Catalina remarked. “The majority is more interested in protecting him since he’s the pilot they chose and he just crashed the plane. His bright idea (Sanitation Fund) fell like a lead balloon. We would have had garbage all over the place.”
Councilman Vincent Vesce said Ruggiero’s Sanitation Fund would have been about a 12% increase on its own with non-industrial users billed $7 per pickup and industrial users $14 per pickup, generating more than $2 million. Ruggiero also suggested increasing water rates by 10% and sewer rates by 20%, both of which he noted haven’t been raised in more than eight years.
“Nobody in their right mind sitting at this table knows we can’t put that on our taxpayers,” Vesce said of the Sanitation Fund proposal.
Councilwoman Vivian McKenzie said Catalina was playing politics but acknowledged the difficult decisions facing the council.
“We don’t want to do something that is really going to hurt our taxpayers,” she said. “We’re not on skid row. We’re in tough times.”
Catalina said the “rubber has hit the road” and the council must “seriously bite the bullet” to get the city on a path to financial recovery.
“It’s like an adult comes home and a teenager had a party and we have to clean up the mess,” Catalina said. “It’s a very crazy position that we’re in.”
The budget must be adopted by December 1. A public hearing is scheduled for November 10 at City Hall.
Rick has more than 40 years’ experience covering local news in Westchester and Putnam counties, running the gamut from politics and crime to sports and human interest. He has been an editor at Examiner Media since 2012. Read more from Rick’s editor-author bio here. Read Rick’s work here: https://www.theexaminernews.com/author/pezzullo_rick-writer/
